Profile

Paul Chatterton is a writer, researcher and campaigner. He is Professor of Urban Futures in the School of Geography. He is currently Director of the University's Sustainable Cities Group which has launched the ground breaking MSc Sustainable Cities. Paul is also co-founder and resident of the award winning low impact housing co-operative Lilac. He has gone forward to help set up Leeds Commuity Homes to help promote community-led housing.

Rachel Huxley, Alice Owen and Paul Chatterton (2019) The role of regime-level processes in closing the gap between sustainable city visions and action. Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eist.2019.04.001

Chatterton P (2013) Towards an agenda for post?carbon cities: lessons from Lilac, the UK's first ecological, affordable cohousing community International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (5), 1654-1674

PhD Supervision

I welcome PhD application in the following areas:

Urban sustainability with a focus on low impact, collaborative housing

Research interests

My work is based on my central inter-related interests of cities, sustainability and future-oriented social change, and an approach based on highly engaged participatory methods and scholar-activism. My work is heavily collaborative and socially oriented in nature and is focused on four interconnected areas.

Stemming from my original work for my Ph.D. in 1998, I have developed conceptual and applied research in the area of critical urban development, regeneration and governance. This work has focused on understanding the socio-spatial dimensions of the processes of urban change, especially through detailed studies of sustainability and bottom-up civic innovation.

b) Autonomous geographies and post-capitalist politics

I have also developed a body of work which focuses on exploring the constituent elements of life beyond capitalism. I have helped advance understandings and opened up a new area for study in what I call ‘autonomous geographies’, spaces where there is a desire to constitute non-capitalist, collective forms of politics, identity and citizenship. My research has challenged simple geographical understandings of activism as either place-bound or rootless and has established how political contention is established through interstitial (in between) everyday places and identities.

The third area of work focuses on opening up new areas of future-orientated debates around the idea of post-carbon cities - an enquiry about the nature of cities beyond the age of oil dependency and novel and disruptive forms of sustainability and low impact living, drawing upon concepts of the commons, experimentation and climate justice.

d) Participatory geographies, co-production and scholar-activism

Finally, I have helped pioneer methodological work in participatory geographies and scholar-activism which underpin all the above three areas. My research activity has always had a strong collaborative element, and I have developed a reputation as an inter-disciplinary scholar-activist with an international impact in work grounded in participatory, action-oriented methods. My work employs normative (looking at how the world ought, or should be) and critical political-economy approaches (exploring the political-institutional and economic mechanisms through which urban social change occurs). The intellectual rationale for this work is that geographic knowledge should have benefits for those affected by social, economic and environmental issues; that groups outside the academy have meaningful contributions to make to the coproduction of agendas, project design, analysis, interpretation and writing research outputs; and to develop more sustained forms of engagement and dissemination to policy communities outside the academy.

Current projects

Building capacity and reflexive learning for urban co-production. A scoping study for a ‘Leeds co-production lab’

Social, economic and political change have placed increased responsibility on local communities and institutions to work differently to respond to grand challenges such as climate change, low economic growth and widening inequality. New models are needed for the co-production of knowledge that supports policy innovation based on more inclusive processes. This project aims to explore the learning, capacity building and delivery potential of a partnership, the ‘Leeds co-production lab’. The lab will be a vehicle for bringing together residents, local universities, businesses, government agencies, third-sector and civil-society organizations to experiment with localized decision-making, shared research, policy-planning and other activities.

Common Ground. Participatory mapping and citizen engagement to promote neighbourhood social action

What would it mean if ordinary citizens had at their fingertips all the data and information they needed to understand and change their neighbourhoods for the better? This is the question that motivated the Common Ground project.

Common Ground was an idea borne out of Leeds City Lab, a six month experiment funded by the UK research councils in how to coproduce solutions in Leeds across different city sectors. Some of the main partners behind Leeds City Lab included Leeds Love It Share It, a community interest company which aims to promote new ways of working, along with the Open Data Institute and Leeds ACTS based at the University of Leeds. This partnership is funded from the Leeds Social Science Institute.

UK Cities face wide-ranging challenges including: inequality, crime, housing shortages, infrastructure congestion, carbon dependency, environmental degradation, and low skills. Local governments are working to address these against a background of prolonged financial austerity, electoral disengagement, misalignments in priorities between central and other tiers of government, rigid funding cycles, organisational silos and low levels of information, all of which contribute to sub-optimal decisions that can intensify persistent problems and degrade public confidence. Given this context, this project is committed to transformation based on enhancing capacity to better manage urban complexity in ways that promote co-production and collaborative working practices, civic enterprise, retain local value and develop new types of institutions.

This project mobilises a multi-sector consortium called TRUE (Transformational Routemapping for Urban Environments) to collaboratively diagnose interrelated urban challenges. TRUE represents meaningful commitment from the university, public, private and civil society sectors to collaborative working in Leeds. TRUE recognises that a step-change is required in the ways that current urban systems are arranged, and that producing this change entails first understanding the integrated nature of the complexities in current and future urban living systems and the factors (including capacity/capability) that anchor the effective delivery of city-wide solutions. Once this understanding is gained, it is then necessary to establish the capabilities required to deliver them. Finally, steps can be taken to achieve effective outcomes. Key to this is the ability to align stakeholder capability to the complexity of the undertaking at city scales. Failure to do so can result in cost and time overruns, political damage, undelivered objectives and outcomes and other unintended consequences.

<h4>Research projects</h4>
<p>Any research projects I'm currently working on will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

Qualifications

PhD, University of Bristol

BA, University of Newcastle

Student education

I teach modules in urban geography and sustainable cities across the undergraduate and masters curriculum. In particular, I teach on the Sustainable Urban Futures discovery strand and the MSc in Sustainable Cities.

Research groups and institutes

Sustainable Cities

Social Justice, Cities, Citizenship

Current postgraduate research students

<h4>Postgraduate research opportunities</h4>
<p>We welcome enquiries from motivated and qualified applicants from all around the world who are interested in PhD study. Our <a href="https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/research-opportunities">research opportunities</a> allow you to search for projects and scholarships.</p>